Prof. Victor Smetacek of Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany and Adjunct Scientist at NIO delivered CSIR-NIO's Foundation Day lecture on Ocean Challenges of the future on 1 January 2012.
Prof. Smetacek highlighted the state of the oceans today. He especially made a wake-up call by highlighting the problems of global warming and their effects on the oceans, flora and fauna in the seas as well as on the land and how the sea level rise would affect the nations. In order to mitigate such threats he stressed the need of innovative ways and criticized NGOs who are afraid of such experiments. He spoke about the iron fertilization experiment (Lohafex) that was carried out a couple of years before by NIO and his institute in Germany in this direction and stressed the need of such innovative approaches. While describing this, he also highlighted the other geo-engineering techniques that are being thought of world over.
Besides such a high-technology he also said an individual can also contribute in reducing the carbon footprints. He was appreciative of Indian values and culture on this aspect. The simple example that he gave are the need of living together. Prof. Smetacek mentioned about extinction of biodiversity in the North American and European countries in the background of still a large biodiversity that exists in Asian countries. Live and let (others) live kind of principle is the reason of this difference - he indicated. He also showed that the consumption of vegetarian food at the individual level makes a big difference in saving large carbon footprints. He highlighted the need for a research on these practices and propagation of these ideas to the western world that would help substantially in mitigating global warming.